After 17 years in prison, Villarruel mentors LA youth affected by gun violence

Half of California’s 1,374 homicide victims last year were Hispanic

Francisco Villarruel, 40, paroled in 2019 after serving 17 years in California state prison, mentors Los Angeles youth affected by gun violence through boxing and conversation without pay, The Guardian reported Tuesday. Now a trained social worker with a master’s in social work from UCLA, Villarruel has built a reputation locally as someone to call when a young gang member, or a young person victimized by gang violence, needs help, the newspaper reported.

The young people Villarruel works with include Gustavo Galvez, 19, who sat with Villarruel at a Los Angeles park to reminisce about their first boxing lesson together. Working out together was not really about boxing, Villarruel told The Guardian — it was about giving Galvez an opportunity to open up and to mentor someone whose pain he understands. “I think a lot of the traumatic scenarios that he went through are very similar to mine in my upbringing,” Villarruel said.

Like Villarruel, Galvez grew up surrounded by gangs and lost friends and classmates to gang-related gun violence, according to The Guardian. “Every day I think it’s my last day [on earth],” Galvez said. “Sometimes I still expect to be killed due to gun violence, even though I’m doing all these good things for myself.” Galvez is now enrolled in community college studying nursing and hopes to eventually become a mental health professional, The Guardian reported.

The scale of the problem Villarruel responds to is documented in California Department of Public Health data cited by The Guardian. Last year, half of the state’s 1,374 homicide victims were Hispanic, the newspaper reported, and thousands of Hispanic people in California are injured by guns each year.

Alein Haro-Ramos, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian that almost half of all Latino youth in major U.S. cities live less than a mile from where a gun homicide occurs. She said such homicides in the U.S. are clustered within certain census tracts marked by poverty and racial segregation, and that trauma can be passed down through parenting under stress created by community violence, economic distress and systemic neglect.

Villarruel’s own exposure to gun violence began before he was born. His father, also named Francisco, was a teenager during the Watts rebellion, the 1965 protests over police brutality in Los Angeles that escalated into days of rioting. The family owned a bakery, the younger Villarruel told The Guardian, and as rioters approached, his father and grandfather fired on them in a desperate attempt to defend their property. Rioters ultimately set the bakery on fire, he said.

When Villarruel was nine, he and his father were at a store when two robbers held them at gunpoint, The Guardian reported. Three years later, his brother-in-law was shot and killed by gang rivals, and the fear and helplessness Villarruel felt in that earlier encounter grew into trauma, the newspaper reported. The thought of being killed like his brother-in-law hardened his resolve to be the one holding a gun, according to The Guardian.

Villarruel joined a gang as a teenager, The Guardian reported, and at 15 went to juvenile hall for two years for gun possession and drug dealing. Not long after being released, he was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping, carjacking and the use of a firearm, according to The Guardian. Villarruel told the newspaper he was not present at the scene of the crime, but that under California law, gang members can be arrested and convicted for gang affiliation. He served 17 years and was paroled in 2019.

The shift came while he was still incarcerated, The Guardian reported. “It took that moment for me to question myself and question what I have been doing,” Villarruel said, recalling a moment alone in his cell at 25 when he considered that he might die in prison and never see his family again. He left gang life behind at 30, became Christian, started therapy, earned his GED in prison, and went on to earn an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in social work from UCLA, The Guardian reported.

At a gang rehabilitation workshop in Inglewood, Villarruel recently shared parts of his story with other people affected by gang violence, telling them gang members often turn to violence because they lack safety, belonging and self-esteem. “A child isn’t born to commit gun violence,” he said. “If a gang member commits a shooting in a community, how many generations will that affect? If we’re going to find a way to subside that, intergenerational trauma definitely has to be addressed.”

For more than three decades, Jorja Leap, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has studied different ways to stop gang violence from hurting marginalized communities, The Guardian reported. Through hundreds of conversations with gang members, Leap told the newspaper, she has identified consistent drivers of gun violence: easy access to guns, sometimes from within a household, which can lead to firearm injuries and deaths; disinvestment in schools and in communities where poverty is high, which contributes to an increase in violence because neglect and a lack of financial resources can push youth toward negative pursuits that result in gun-related conflict; and intergenerational trauma, because when people are traumatized by mental or physical abuse, they may inflict pain on others, even family members.

In some Latino communities, certain views of masculinity within a family — what Leap described to The Guardian as “machismo, a sense of control over one’s life” — compound those factors when combined with trauma and firearm accessibility, the newspaper reported. The most effective strategy in curbing gang-related gun violence in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Leap said, is replacing the gang structure in someone’s life with long-term community support at home, in schools and in the streets.

Over five years, Leap and her team collected data and stories of more than 300 people who sought services from Homeboy Industries, an LA-based nonprofit that helps rehabilitate gang members and people who were formerly incarcerated, The Guardian reported. The study revealed that community support such as access to job training and mentorship helped reduce gang retention, and that replacing dysfunctional relationships with healthier community bonds was central to recovery, Leap said. “It’s the feeling someone else has gone through this, and that is what’s so powerful,” she said.

For Galvez, speaking openly about his traumatic experiences has helped him heal and is how he remembers friends he has lost, The Guardian reported. “Every day I carry them with me,” Galvez said. Villarruel acknowledged to the newspaper that healing from lifelong trauma is a difficult process, and he has seen young people he has mentored fall back into old, destructive patterns under the influence of friends and their old environment. He said he can only do so much on his own.

For years, Villarruel has worked with organizations in Los Angeles that help people recently released from prison reintegrate into society, The Guardian reported. He said he wants to help others break out of the cycle by unpacking the trauma that often steers them toward violence in the first place. “I feel like to end one cycle, I have to start a new one,” Villarruel said, “and this new cycle is leading individuals in the right direction.”